The schizophrenic turns surreal late in the second act of the new stage
adaptation of Mary Poppins, which just opened at the New Amsterdam. Mr.
George Banks, facing personal financial disaster after concluding his
children should be the most important things in his life, blurts to his
blustering bank chairman boss, "There are more important things in life than
making money!"

Oh really? Someone should have told producers Disney and Cameron
Mackintosh, because the show surrounding Mr. Banks's revelation professes
exactly the opposite, in deed if not in word. Of the many problems with
this charmless and practically artless musical, which has been directed by
Richard Eyre with infinite theme-park flair, this is perhaps the most
insurmountable.

Disney and Mackintosh are both experts at shepherding shows to worldwide
success with generous infusions of capital, and ensuring your $110 ticket
gets you a superb-looking show. So when they teamed to bring to the stage
both P.L. Travers's stories about an enchanted English nanny and the 1964
Disney musical film that made her a household name, results at once
eye-popping and headache-inducing were perhaps inevitable.

But the other shows each has been involved with - Mackintosh's
record-smashing pop operas, including Les Misérables, The Phantom of the
Opera, and Cats; Disney's Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Aida, and
Tarzan - haven't told stories about the dangers of pursuing wealth to the
exclusion of all else. So even when those shows lack soul - as they all too
frequently do - they're never hypocritical. Mary Poppins is seldom anything
but.

It looks like designer Bob Crowley was encouraged to spend a small fortune
on sets and costumes of uncommon bounty, which evoke Victorian London in
sepia shades, Technicolor, and opulent extravagance. But for Mackintosh and
Disney, these are investments in a show all but guaranteed to run somewhere
in the realm of forever, and it's in every other element of the show, from
the book and score to the performers, that Mary Poppins is indistinguishable
from a no-fee, no-frills ATM for its creators.

For while Mackintosh reportedly wanted to divest Travers's property of the
film's saccharine, he wasn't willing to do it at the expense of the score
and characterizations that made the movie an international and
intergenerational phenomenon. Thus, this Mary Poppins attempts to combine
the relative grit of Travers's stories and the blood-level familiarity of
classic Sherman brothers songs like "Chim-Chim-Cher-ee," "A Spoonful of
Sugar," and "Let's Go Fly a Kite" into a new creation that's the best of
both worlds.

Librettist Julian Fellowes, however, doesn't reconcile these contradictory
attitudes into a cohesive work. Sometimes Mary is sweet, willing to escort
Jane and Michael Banks on walks in the park, on the London rooftops, and
even among the stars, and other times she's downright vicious, as when she
tortures them for torturing their toys, but the nature of her caprice is
never elucidated. (Mary may insist she never explains anything; the writer
of a musical's book doesn't have that option.) What's more, Mr. and Mrs.
Banks have been transformed from passionate advocates of fiscal
responsibility and women's suffrage into passionless victims, he of an
upbringing under a totalitarian nanny named Miss Andrew, she of the belief
that social status should be cultivated at any cost.

These choices, and others, rob the material of its inherent musicality,
which doesn't stop the songs from coming. And as long as audiences get
those songs - plus a flying, spellcasting Mary, a wise-cracking chimney
sweep in her compatriot Bert, and the requisite uplifting ending - they'll
be thrilled whatever other flaws abound. The Shermans' songs remain bouncy
and playful, though a couple have been (regrettably, but not devastatingly)
excised. George Stiles and Anthony Drewe have written a bunch of new
numbers to round out the score; while they're in no way the equals of the
Shermans' classics, they're the best Disney stage songs since The Lion King.

They don't stick in the memory, though; little about this Mary Poppins does
that wasn't implanted years (or decades) ago. Some of Matthew Bourne's
choreography, especially for the bloated second-act production number "Step
in Time," is cute (though the frantic "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,"
diluted to a series of reductive hand gestures, disappoints), and it will
take a while for Crowley's sets and costumes to be equaled in quality and
quantity at today's reduced budgets.

Everything else tends to vanish from your mind almost instantly, including
the performers, most of whom seem to have been cast precisely so they can
easily be replaced. Eyre even seems to have directed them to display as
little personality as possible, so the next 20 years of sit-down and touring
productions will all have performers displaying roughly the same,
animatronic traits.

Nothing else can explain Ashley Brown in the title role, bearing a wax-lips
smile (even when she frowns) that doesn't make her recall Julie Andrews's
luminous, auntlike Mary or Travers' no-nonsense one as much as a department
store mannequin in a Halloween window. Brown possesses a pleasant, light
soprano, but no other distinctive qualities that suggest she'll follow
Andrews into superstardom.

Daniel Jenkins is a solid Mr. Banks, even an affecting one near the show's
end, but lacks the authority that will make him more than a little boy lost.
Rebecca Luker brings several layers of vague perturbations to Mrs. Banks,
but little else; it doesn't help that she's saddled with the show's blandest
lines and songs, but that doesn't excuse her subdued-shrieky portrayal.
Mark Price and Jane Carr are serviceable in the thankless roles of the
Banks's bedraggled servants; the Jane and Michael I saw, Kathryn Faughnan
and Henry Hodges, weren't much better.

Only Gavin Lee and Ruth Gottschall are allowed to capitalize on their own
unique talents. As the wild-eyed, rubber-limbed jack-of-all trades Bert,
also the show's de facto narrator, Lee (who originated Bert in London in
2004) brings a raucous, music-hall quality to Bert that makes him spicier
than the underseasoned roles surrounding him. If he's never better than
when shamelessly showcasing his fearlessness to tap upside-down in "Step in
Time," he's also never less than credible (higher praise here than you might
think).

Gottschall's got it even tougher as Mr. Banks's destructive former nanny,
who arrives to replace a departed Mary following one of the least
suspenseful first-act curtains in history, and who brandishes smoking
potions and operatically babbles about their contents of "Brimstone and
Treacle" a la the Wicked Witch of the West. Though Miss Andrew is little
more than a mild threat for Mary to vanquish, Gottschall invests her with
the courage of her demented convictions in a way that throttles you to
attention unlike anything else here.

Brown is only equivalently riveting when making her aerial exit from the
theater at show's end, creating the closest thing to actual theatrical magic
this production sees. The visual is so striking that your attention is
drawn away from the once-divided-now-restored Banks family on its way to
creating its own happy ending; we're not expected to care for - or even
notice - them when there are special effects to attend to. That, more than
anything else, shows where this Mary Poppins's devotions truly lie.